


No Safety on a Body

by synthwave



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic Violence, M/M, Male Pregnancy, Trans Male Character, Unplanned Pregnancy, trans joker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-25 23:16:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13223310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthwave/pseuds/synthwave
Summary: A wise man once said that there are no mistakes, just happy little accidents. But tryreallyscrewing up if you want to see how far inspirational quotes get you.





	No Safety on a Body

**Author's Note:**

> As a trans man who's personally freaked out by pregnancy, this was difficult to write, but that's probably why I come back to the theme so often. 
> 
> (Beyond that, the Joker holds plenty of ideas I find uncomfortable and wrong, and isn't particularly careful in his phrasing choices. I don't know if this necessarily needs to be clarified, but I'd hate to have communicated it badly and give the impression that he's acting as my mouthpiece.)

* * *

Now it’s just me and you.

No, not You, as in him. You as in you--the blood-feeder, the humanity virus. Before we start off on the wrong foot, let’s get a few things straight:

First, sure, I told him to do it. But I didn’t mean it. 

Maybe I did mean it--but not really, not for keeps. See, he goes to pieces and it’s _glorious_. There’s not a thing on this hell-swept earth I wouldn’t do to see him tunnel in on me like a man-eating animal and that primal drive gets his pulse thundering until he finally loses it. That’s what I live for: breaking him. Digging my nails under his skin and pulling. Stoking the fire and then burning him from inside until he collapses in on himself. 

It’s good for him. Keeps his blood pressure low.

So I told him to do it. I begged him to do it. And he knew what he was doing. It’s just that neither of us planned for nature to defy the circumstances aligned against it, which if you knew us might be funny. You could almost call it a miracle.

Second, _I_ was supposed to infect _him_. Not the other way around.

* * *

I hitch a ride with a trucker who looks exactly like you’d expect a man who spends most of his time driving back and forth across I-5 to look, from his antediluvian Pilot refill mug to the oily dirt trapped under every hangnail. You don’t have the background for that mental tableau yet, but life is caricature. Get used to it.

After about thirty miles he fumbles a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and the cigarette lighter out of the dashboard, and asks me if I smoke. I don’t. He says, “Well, I’m gonna,” and lights up without rolling down the window.

His shocking disregard for passenger safety convinces me to drive the rest of the way to the outskirts of Sacramento myself. I leave the truck in an abandoned parking lot where garish green moss bursts like keloid scars through the asphalt, and use his phone to call the number above the license plate so I can tell them what I thought of his driving.

Don’t say I never did anything for you.

* * *

I buy a bus ticket to somewhere further south. The clerk doesn’t bother to look at me. At-will invisibility is one of the more useful skills you can master; it means never having to make too many trade-offs for your notoriety. The more fascinating you are, the easier this is. A hack telegraphs longing and stage fright like a beacon.

There’s a transient sitting in the corner of the station with his head down over his arms so I sit on the floor next to him and we shoot the breeze. Neither of us have names. He claims he used to have one, but it’s attached to a sex offender record after he took a piss outside of a Catholic school and flashed the nuns as he ran. I tell him I’m on my way to Hollywood to make toothpaste commercials and play in a queer anarchist garage band called the Mighty Cucks. He doesn’t believe me any more than I believe him and we get a good laugh out of it.

* * *

Now, one thing you’ll have is fingerprints. They’re these tiny whorls on your fingers and toes that move if you stare at them long enough, and if you’re not careful they’ll put them in your file. My advice is to get rid of the freeloading little bastards as soon as you can lay your hands on some hydrochloric acid.

* * *

I won’t even think the name of where I'm going in case he wakes up in the dead of morning having dreamed of me again, a flash of insight lighting up his eyes like a vision from the god he thinks I don’t know he still prays to. 

It’s not physically opposite to where I came from, as in you couldn’t lob a grenade across the proverbial American pond and hit it. That’s what I wanted but it didn’t shake out, which is just as well because when you’re trying to stay ahead of somebody who inhales patterns and exhales perfect results you have to set aside those little conceits now and again. 

I settled for total cultural inversion. 

The sky here is gentian blue. This bus is such a relic that the windows open; the air rolling in over my head is dry enough to make my eyes burn and smells like warm lilacs. At the city limits we pass a hand-painted wooden sign on its last weathered legs that says We Are Building A Safe and Inclusive Community.

I might throw up but I’m pretty sure that’s your fault.

* * *

It's called a women’s shelter but the nice lady on the phone says they take transgenders. That’s how she says it, trailing off at the end like she knows she’s said the wrong thing but can’t remember the right one and the moment to correct herself passes in silence. It may be that she’s never had occasion to take a transgender, herself; I know somebody with considerable experience in that field, but that's how we got into this mess in the first place.

This is all hilarious for reasons you won’t understand until much later, but she’s so afraid to fuck up again that she makes it worse by acting like muliebrity is a title I’d really have to bust ass to be stripped of so _don't worry, don't worry_. That said, I’ve been rejected from--in his words--a _staggering number_ of facilities in my time on account of being what people call a psychopath, so her anxiety over how to deal gently with me is almost refreshingly insulting.

If you never get the chance to hear somebody mentally kicking themselves to death, it sounds like caltrops under a tire.

* * *

I think it was Emerson who said you should insist upon yourself and never imitate; they leave the “imitation is suicide” part off the scrapbook stencils but the point stands. Try to never get into a situation where you’re dying your hair for the third time in a month in a Walgreens bathroom so you can look like anyone but you, staring into a dead man’s eyes and biting your knuckles bloody so you won't use them to shatter the mirror.

* * *

While I’m an ambulatory chrysalis you and I are going to hide away within a maze of five double-wide trailers with an unpainted board fence around the back. Evergreen trees and oaks don't quite block out the sun in this part of town, but they do stand between the establishment in question and the neighbors’ wholesome backyards and sideways looks.

Outside the chain-link gate in front is a small, sullen cluster of dead fetus advocates. I assume they’re in favor of dead fetuses because there are pictures of them on their signs, bloody and dismembered. The signs are wordless, presumably because their creators can’t read. If they could, they might’ve figured out that this is the opposite of the dead fetus venue, which is sixteen-and-a-half miles north. 

What I really need is a tub of raw chicken livers, a slingshot, and the element of surprise.

* * *

I had a few options. He won't believe me, but I picked the one that'd hurt him the least.

I could've ended it quick, but if I kept something like that from him he'd never forgive me. If I’d told him he would’ve said _it's your choice_ but he would have cried for you in secret for the rest of his life, do you know that? It'd torture him, thinking about what you could have been. Not in the fun way, either, but in the way that makes him rethink everything. It wasn't that long ago I had to deal with his last existential crisis, when the guilt tried to make him human.

If I'd given him his druthers he would've wanted to keep you. No offense, but I'm not looking for that kind of lifestyle change.

And I can't let him see me like this.

The first time he got all doe-eyed and think-of-the-sprog at me I'd have jumped off the clock tower. You have to understand how long it's taken me to get him to a point where he doesn't knee-jerk into normalcy at the drop of a shell casing, because he thinks his parents should be allowed to possess his body and spontaneously reincarnate. He can't help it much, mind you. It's how he was raised.

Come to think of it, it's probably how you'll be raised, too.

* * *

They've got trailer parks where I come from, but things are different here. The ground cover is white gravel instead of dead sodden leaves. There are no mysterious blocks of pockmarked foam, no shoes hanging from the power lines. The plants are all alive. The dumpsters are corralled for their own safety. They look like they might even get emptied regularly, and you can't ask for more than that.

A counselor by the name of Angela Something tells me this used to be an interim school, before they finished building an actual school with a real honest to goodness campus and everything. I nod like I’m supposed to. 

She doesn’t meet my eyes for a while. I’m ninety-seven percent sure she's the one I talked to on the phone. 

She didn’t know I was actually in town. They don’t have space on short notice, she tells me when I’m sitting on her ancient couch and watching her cat-faced clock’s time-telling whiskers tick slowly. There’s a waiting list. She can give me contact info for a place down by Oakland but do I have somewhere to stay in the meantime? 

I have money. 

Angela doesn’t know what to say. She should tell me it doesn’t work that way, but I know she's desperate to start paying for things money takes a long time to deliver on. I guess we’re all in dire straits, aren’t we?

It’s called quid pro quo. Look it up sometime.

“Look,” I say, and lean in, and bury myself in the fetid pools of human vulnerability. Whatever gets me out of the tedium of this situation, which is turning into an unbearable itching right under my skin. I tell her I’m scared of how I’ll be treated at a hospital and I tell her I need help with the legal paperwork and I’m mentally ill with no support network and I have a criminal record and when she starts to waver, her brow settling into that _I’ll see what I can do_ line, I break out the heavy artillery. When you can't avoid the truth, make it pay its own way.

“There’s someone looking for me,” I say, “and it’s really important that he doesn’t find me.”

The corners of Angela’s mouth tighten. And...sold. 

I give her the money in cash. She opens the suitcase, looks for a long time, closes it, looks at me, opens it again, looks at it, looks at me. 

“Don't take this the wrong way,” she says slowly, “but this is a little unorthodox as far as donations go.”

She means _who are you_ , she means _where did you get this_ , and she wants to know if she can spend it with clean hands. 

“Inheritance,” I tell her, and she needs it bad enough that she doesn't ask who died.

* * *

If I had to tell you a fairytale I couldn't make up anything better than the demon who sired you on me. He is, after all, lord and ruler of the kingdom of night--an island of neon and sodium glow, with light pollution and freeway lanes circling it like planetary rings. I’m much bigger there, the flickering corona of a perfectly aligned solar eclipse. You wouldn’t know me.

We're locked in an eternal race to destruction, my king and I, although we've drafted a sort of treaty in blood and various other bodily fluids. The rules are simple: philosophy only, back-to-back against the rest of the world, no war crimes. We renegotiate the fiddly details on the regular, but you didn't ask me for a civics lesson.

It was love at first sight. Me when I fixed my eyes on his beautiful face just before the acid took me, and him when he saw what it had made of me. What I'd become for him.

It was years before I got him to admit that from where we ended up, terror and love look pretty much the same.

* * *

The shelter’s population reminds me of sweet, traitorous Harley and her endless potential. If I had nothing but time I could make Bedlam in miniature, but he's not here to appreciate my work, so there’s no real point. I forget most of their names as soon as I hear them. I don't want them to remember mine, either.

I do have a roommate. Her name is Shasta and I'm warned she can be difficult. I'm difficult. Nobody else wanted to bunk with her because she's got a mean look. I’ve got a mean look. 

When we’re introduced she gives me a dead-eyed, lopsided smile.

I see a fellow traveler, and I smile back.

When Angela leaves we circle each other, metaphorically speaking, while she sits backwards in her folding chair and I stand by the door. She breaks eye contact first, but not bad. Most people don't hold it that long.

“What're you in for,” I say, tossing my stuff on the top bunk.

She shrugs. “Eighteen to life.”

We laugh.

* * *

This is just between you and me, but normalcy makes me physically sick, like a punch to the gut. But he’s its sworn defender and every now and then I’m forced to make a stomach-churning feint at it.

 _That's interacting with people on their terms_ , he told me once. _That's what finding common ground feels like._

I told him that said a hell of a lot more about him than about me and it's fucked up if true. He refused to concede the point gracefully, as always.

My back hurts. I hate you.

* * *

Shasta’s got long brittle hair the color of Cabernet Sauvignon and she weighs 210 pounds. The clinician wants her on a diet, sniffing around to make her accountable to them. 

"Fuck that," she says. "Especially now."

“Fair,” I say.

She looks me up and down. “You ever eat?”

“When I have to.”

“You're what. Two, three months?”

“Six.”

“Jesus, dude.”

Four months since I last saw him. It's fine, I've been gone longer. As long as it's me calling the shots, it's fine.

* * *

Days. Nothing to occupy my time with unless I want him to come down on me like the bat out of hell he is, so I go dormant, pull myself down into the muck, and wait.

I sing under my breath at night until my roomie mumbles would I mind shutting up? And I do, because the person-shell I’m in has a case of shutupitis that’ll eventually prove fatal when he vanishes off the face of the earth.

Sometimes I can't help checking the phone remotely even though it's a risk, even though doing it under the covers in the dark makes this method acting a little more real than I’d like. I don't go as far as reading the messages but I can see he's called and called and texted and left voicemails and I'm delighted because now he knows how it feels.

* * *

I throw up every time after they examine me and if you loved me you'd crawl up my innards already so I wouldn't have to do this for one more day. I should have sewn you under the skin of my forehead on the off-chance you’d come out fully armed.

Angela tells me don't sweat it, they see a lot of people who just want it over with. She asks me if I want to see the ultrasound and I'm morbidly curious even though she didn't scream when she saw it so you must not be very interesting.

You look like a drowned rat and I say so. Angela laughs, so I revise my opinion of her.

* * *

I lay on my side. Whatever you're doing, stop.

“Who are you talking to?” Shasta says.

“The parasite.”

She snorts. “What for?”

“I hear they grow faster if you do.”

She doesn’t talk much, but she does say she’s never met a pregnant man before. I’m the eighth wonder of the modern world. “Gravid,” I correct her. Pregnant is for pauses.

I get nosy about her story to distract myself from the shivering nausea. She came from Marysville, north of here. So did the man she hasn’t seen for six weeks, ever since he went out into the backyard during one of their fights and broke a bottle over a brick. Right outside the screen door, so she could hear him making a jagged edge for her. 

“I hate him,” she says. Because I have no reason not to hate him, so do I. 

The doctors have presumptuously declared Shasta’s larva a girl. She hasn't picked a name yet because she doesn’t know if she wants something practical like Michelle ( _ma belle / sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble_ ) or something her mother will hate, such as Eowyn or Moon Unit. She thinks Moon Unit Zappa Froelich will cause all sorts of administrative chaos and ensure a character-building childhood. I tell her she knows what to do. 

She asks me what your name is and through gritted teeth I say, “Fucking Consequences.”

“That's good,” she says. “It's got layers.”

She’s keeping hers, which is intriguing in a middling sort of way. I want to see what becomes of it. If we ever meet again, I expect a report.

* * *

There are predators and prey in the world but everybody's born swimming in the same sticky fluid, except me and him and maybe you. He was born in his parents’ cooling blood and I was born in the acid that ate new wormholes into my brain.

You have his blood. I wonder if you have my acid. I didn't see you writhing on the ultrasound.

* * *

Angela takes the other residents to movie night at the downtown theater but Shasta and I stay back because her ankles are swollen and I can’t believe George Clooney is still allowed to be in films and we would both prefer death to socializing. 

At around 9:00 PM, the second genetic contributor to my roommate’s outgrowth decides to grant our wish. He jumps the chain link fence and starts beating on trailer doors, screaming for her to come out. She ignores it until he's bellowing at our window.

“Are you planning to do anything about that?” I ask.

“No.” Her voice is flat, but she flinches every time his fists hit siding. “Sorry.”

I retrieve a few low-profile weapons from their hiding places. “For what?”

“He's probably gonna kill me this time.”

Ah, I know that tone of voice. It's the clarity of resignation, the moment when a human being has nothing more to lose. Now, this is _my_ kingdom, and I knew her for a subject, and they don’t look to me for tax breaks and comprehensive health coverage.

“Do you care about him at all?” I say.

Shasta’s eyes widen. “No.”

Romeo comes around to kick the door in but the trailer doors swing out and when I shove it hard he stumbles back with a bloody nose. He reels and shakes his head, squaring to recover, but he's already lost this one and doesn't know it. _C’est la vie._

If you're not a gargoyle like your old man, remember: eyes, throat, genitals. Don’t get fancy until you’ve got them tied up, just go hard.

I haul him down the ramp leading up to the door and put him to the ground. The Marysville terror cusses at me while I roll out a cinderblock from underneath the trailer, but when he sees Shasta he shrieks. I kick him in the jaw, hard enough to make his teeth click together.

“Grab onto this for me, will you?” I pat the cinderblock.

He spits, slurring through blood-coated lips. “Fuck you.”

I kick him again for being boring. “If you’d rather bite it, that can be arranged.”

Shasta stares down at him from on high. She’s haloed in the light of the doorway, her arms folded and her eyes clean of mercy. 

He curls his fingers around the edge, already wincing and moaning. There’s something in his system, which is too bad because it’ll probably take the edge off. I put my boot heel down hard in the fragile space between his joints and swear him in, hand to god, until he’s weeping and promising he'll never so much as look at her again.

Weak.

I test the blade of a knife against his jawline and march him back to his Chevrolet, where I get in after him. “Drive.”

“Broke my finger, you fucking psycho.” 

“Yep,” I say. “Don't worry, I’ll take care of that.”

He drives. I spin the dashboard dials until his talk radio blather sputters into white noise.

* * *

I stop him when we’re out in the weeds past the edges of town, where trees and brush are thick all up and down the hillsides. And then we walk, with me at his back. When he goes slow or gets a little saucy, I remind him who’s got the knife. It’d be a downright pleasant stroll if I happened to be in my right self, but I refrain from whistling.

When I find a secluded clearing in which to hold myself a confession session, we chat. And oh, he’s been a very bad boy. I ask him how hard he wants to make things for himself in the long run, his dull eyes flicking to and fro as he weighs the benefits of contact with the law, which for all its flaws isn’t likely to be on his meth-cooking, opiate-peddling, statutory-offending side. 

As loathe as I am to draw inspiration from such a stagnant well as organized crime, there’s a certain elegance to minor amputation: it’s arguably the maximum amount of physical suffering you can inflict while leaving your victim room to lie about the circumstances. It's been long enough that my teeth ache, my hands ache, but in a good way. Like stretching or popping your joints or taking a solid hit you were anticipating.

I let him off light, really.

Not even out of the womb yet and you've already been party to a maiming. Bring that to show and tell, why don’t you.

* * *

I walk back to town, even though there’s light in the sky by the time I’m on the main street. It’s a good opportunity to get personally acquainted with the place I’m going to abandon you in.

This is going to be your life: dust and grassy fields, wooded hills and a wall of mountain ranges. A pocket city modernized by people with money who want to play at being folks from town. There’s rusty corrugated metal and decaying grey planks buried in the tall grass, and undoubtedly worse things if you look deep enough. The people you’ll call your parents will make sure you get a tetanus shot before you play in it. 

They’re the reason I didn’t leave you on a friendly doorstep, ring the bell, and dash, by the way. Even when I’m long gone, I’ll have jumped through enough hoops for helpful Angela to affirm their claim to you. I’ll never meet them, but I know more about them than they know about themselves--I’ve run my scabby fingers through their history these past months, and I didn’t leave anything to chance. I didn’t leave any prints, either.

They just bought a two-story house with a front and back yard. He might even approve.

It’s not only for you. It’s for him. When he finds out--and he will--there you’ll be, living the life he used to think he needed. He can spy on you to his heart's content, with far-seeing eyes you’ll never feel the weight of. He only ever wanted the picket fence crap for the sake of someone like you.

* * *

I see a reflection in the window of a local artsy-craftsy shop. It looks like the face of someone who could have been born here, grown up here, dropped out of school here to work at the gas station across the street. It takes me longer than it should to clock it as mine.

It looks like a molted skin, looks like me in bad makeup and a desaturated palette. The last time I saw this face in a storefront I was as unborn as you are and it was raining and the shell I rattled around in was wondering how ungrateful it would be to pray for death when there was nothing afflicting him but the chronic malaise of existence. 

Don’t tell your father I remember that.

The shell’s too tight and every time I breathe the cracks get a little deeper. I open my mouth, expecting to feel my own fingers poking out from inside like tusks or spider legs. Hooking into the corners, pulling them apart wider and wider until my face splits in half. 

It’s not that I need him to define me--much--but I want to scream until he finds me. I want to draw the clouds over the sky and throw his summons across them. Barring that I’d like to go back to the woods and drag Romeo back in by the ankles, spill some more of his blood on the leaves, hear him gibber and howl. I want him to know what he woke.

The hideous lurching feeling of being lost between times and places lasts until the sun’s glare obliterates my reflection. I find myself again, a spark at the core of rotting animatronics, and walk on. 

The sky turns blue and I shuffle through the shelter gate just as your hometown starts commuting to work.

* * *

I’ve brought Shasta a gift. I drop it on her bed and she unwraps it while I slip into something a little less bloody and shove last night’s clothes into the burn pile on my side of the closet.

“Holy shit.” She pokes the finger, which is starting to resemble a novelty rubber prop. “Is he dead?”

“Oh, probably not.”

I don’t see regret in her, or fear. Only detached curiosity. She’ll be all right. This wasn’t one of those good deeds he insists every sentient creature is capable of, but there was a time not long ago when I would have taken her with me to the woods, given her the knife, and taught her how to breaststroke across the Rubicon. I’ve committed a minor war crime, but what your papa doesn’t know won’t kill him.

“Thanks,” Shasta says. “But what the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

I tell her to put it in Moon Unit’s hope chest. She’ll appreciate it more when she gets older.

* * *

If I lay my hand on my stomach I can feel you move and it’s the only way I know for sure that you’re still alive in there. If he were here he’d want to do the same. The mental image makes me want to leave my skin.

Shasta rolls over in the bottom bunk. “Can I ask you something?”

I rest my forehead against the wall and pretend it’s the cool plating of his armor in what is truly the most pathetic moment I’ve had in a year. “You just did.”

“Your kid’s dad,” she says. “Long story?”

Too much common ground, or too little. My brain swims. I spin a yarn but there’s a shred of truth in it and he ends up sounding more Byronic than he deserves. 

I got far too used to sleeping beside him, but I’ll stay quarantined until you’ve run your course. I’ll be damned if he looks at me and sees you.

* * *

You’ll be the only one, I’ve decided. You’re the outside shot, kiddo. I would’ve swept the whole idea off the table from the start--I wanted him to do that, with his surgeon’s hands--but he wouldn’t have taken any joy in cutting into me because he hates to lock a door behind him if there was ever a chance he’d want to see the other side. 

Well, now he can’t ever open his fool mouth and say _what if_ again and I can’t ever open my mouth and my legs and say _yeah what if_ like an even bigger dumbass. Over this, at least--I imagine we’ll keep making a brutal mess of ourselves and each other for at least as long as these substandard mortal meat prisons hold fast. 

Neither of us will last forever, at least not in the way he sees it. But that’s my job--seeing things he can’t. We shore each other up like that. And what I see--what I _know_ , better than anything--is the eternal song and dance of him and me. Over and over, interlocked and endless, dying and rising up again. 

I burn, he sows. Don’t think too hard about that metaphor.

And what about you? You’ve got nothing to compare this town to, but less than two weeks here and I can tell you it’s as primed to catch fire as anywhere else. I did contemplate touching off a few deliberate sparks, and not just because I’m a little stir-crazy. The smell of smoke would cling to you, give you something to fight against or vanish into or hold inside your lungs. You were conceived in mutual violence, tender as raw flesh and slow like good torture always is. Why should you escape unscathed?

But here’s the kicker: I want to see what you make of it.

Maybe you’ll live out your life on a painfully smooth trajectory, and I’ll never have a reason to think about you again. No common ground between us. You might even be an exceptional human being, which isn’t saying much; he’d have been one, too, even if tragedy hadn’t elevated him to divinity.

But if nature kicks nurture to the curb, then we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we?

Maybe you’ll wage our war on this side of the country, all by yourself. If you’re heir to the angels of his better nature, you might till the soil you walk on and become its protector. If you’re tainted irreparably by nine months of attachment to me through the umbilical chain...well, I leave you this place and all of its residents to put to the torch and remake in your image. 

Or you might be both of us. Neither. Who knows? Maybe you’ll come visit us in the city someday, when you’re old enough to understand what you are. Maybe you’ll demand answers. You might even want revenge. Wouldn’t that be fun?

You’re royalty, technically speaking. But a birthright is only as good as your claim to it.

He can’t say a thing about that, either, because I saw how bad he wanted you to exist. Eye to eye, drawing out the point of no return, desperate to hear that I wanted you, too.

Remember how I said I didn’t mean it?

 _Liar_ , your father calls me. A term of endearment like _killer, monster, you evil son-of-a-bitch_. I tell him to smile when he says that, and sometimes he even does.

**Author's Note:**

> The name of the story is taken from [this piece](https://youtu.be/MdELozXaXis?t=35m13s) by Lorn.
> 
> Spoilers: Shasta is a great mom and goes on to be cool.


End file.
